<div>week in review --</div><div><br></div><div>Enabled hi-fi input for blender on Mac OS, and it's everything I dreamed of. Nice smooth strokes even on slower machines or complex scenes. Right now, mouse and pen are hi-fi by default, which most tools don't need or want. This will be fixed when tools are able to auto-hint their preferred input fidelity to ghost (default is normal-fi, the current behavior).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Wacom developer support informed me that neither their driver nor Windows coalesces tablet input (unlike Mac OS). This was the key to hi-fi input on the Mac, so I had to brainstorm a bit to find the Windows solution. Found it! Coming soon.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thoroughly re-read (and scribbled all over) the "3D Mouse" developer guide with an eye toward Windows implementation. Mostly worked out, just need to type it in.</div><div><br></div><div>Discovered that my SpaceNav demo crashes if you don't have the SpaceNav driver installed. Not a big deal for a demo, but a deal breaker for blender integration. Weak linking against the 3Dconnexion framework should fix this. Also tweaked my axis normalization code to treat 350 (not 500) as 100%, as recommended by their docs. I'm releasing the updated demo for Mac OS 10.4+ as it doesn't depend on any later features.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now building on Windows using MinGW. Had to clean up some very minor errors -- gcc 4.5 is picky! -- but it compiles. Then fails to launch. The code is 0xC0000005, meaning it tried to execute data. Maybe this has to do with Python? ABI incompatibility with libs? Disabling DEP does not help.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Reverted to previous "continuous grab" code, since mine was much worse.</div><div><br></div><div>Studied event dispatch mechanisms, which are essential for lo-fi input and mouse/pen event spoofing. wm_event_system is a beast compared to the austere GHOST_EventManager...</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>next week --</div><div><br></div><div>Continue wrangling with Windows build. Suggestions are welcome! Already tried the Win7 SDK then Visual Studio 2008 on one machine (64-bit) and MinGW on another (32-bit).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Integrate NDOF support and clean up plugin boilerplate, which I never got around to this past week.</div><div><br></div><div>Get Windows hi-fi input to match the Mac version.</div><div><br></div><div>Post more plans for the pen on the project web site. The pen is due for an overhaul, and I need to hammer out the details.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>progress --</div><div><br></div><div>One of my main goals for this summer (and the one people seem to want the most) is high fidelity input, which now works on one platform and is catching up fast on another. I'm about to crawl from ghost into the window manager, which I suppose is itself a sign of progress. On track!</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>[<a href="http://invisible-cow.com/blender/soc">invisible-cow.com/blender/soc</a>]</div><div><br></div>Mike Erwin<br>musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire<br>